Do you recognise the following scenario?
You've just finished a long meeting, but instead of just slipping back to your office chairs with noise-cancelling headsets, you stay seated.
You acknowledge each other's contribution to the meeting. You talk about how each person did really well and what behaviours might need to be corrected in the future. You give each other feedback.
Read about meeting management here.
If you can answer yes, then you are lucky to be either a manager or an employee in an organisation with elements of a healthy feedback culture. Lucky because in doing so, you have put yourself in an even better position to build good relationships and create future organisational success.
With you, you understand that healthy feedback is part of the foundation for development, learning and recognition - both on an individual level, but also on an organisational level. Feedback therefore helps to create more meaning and momentum in the workplace.
But what do you do if you are not lucky enough to be part of such an environment? And why is it a good idea to have a structured approach to feedback in the first place?
We asked Feedwork about this.
Putting relationships back at the forefront
Feedwork consists of Morten, Mikkel, Jonas and Danni. They help organisations to develop and implement healthy feedback environments, e.g. through workshops for employees and managers, as well as coaching/mentoring programmes. They see themselves as a large social entrepreneurial project that wants all people to have the best conditions to learn and develop, and to be able to engage in healthy and rewarding relationships - privately as well as professionally. In this, feedback with its associated elements is essential, says Morten:
"We know that people make their lives up of relationships. They're the ones that matter, after all. So we want to give people the language they need to form healthy and lasting relationships."
-Morten Melby, Feedwork
Feedworks' own formation in feedback stems from their careers in the military and elite sports. Here they experienced first-hand how framed evaluation and coaching of behaviours and situations can make a significant difference in forming relationships and contribute to big successes on the bottom line.
Their thesis is that organisations will thrive and grow better when relationships are put first. For them, a healthy work environment is based on respectful and inclusive relationships, where everyone is accountable for their behaviour. That's why they work with a slightly broader concept of feedback," explains Morten:
"We see feedback as something we can take in and use to learn about our behaviour. It can be anything from conversations with the manager, but also looks from colleagues, reactions, body language, shouts you get in traffic, etc. All of it is an opportunity to find out: "Well, there's someone here who thinks my acting behaviour is really good or vice versa; here's someone who really thinks I should correct" So our feedback concept includes everything we can use to learn about our behaviour".
Why a healthy feedback culture is attractive
People have always been attracted to success. Everyone wants to be part of the good story, and the feedback culture is part of the story of the healthy organisation. People thrive here because such a culture opens up both an increased individual focus, while also taking a strong interest in the collective and its development.
Morten says that they see how people in companies that have actively worked with the feedback culture feel much better in their working lives. If you look at the classic well-being parameters such as sickness absence, employee rotation, skill requirements and so on, companies with an implemented feedback culture just perform better, but it's also very much about employees feeling that their day-to-day at work is meaningful.
Making work meaningful is something that has particularly caught on with 'the millenials' and their entry into the labour market. The younger generations are much more adaptable and willing to constantly optimise themselves. They therefore demand this continuous conversation about development with colleagues and managers. At the same time, however, it is also because the softer values have actually become something that is talked about in the boardroom. They now talk about how feedback is the means to both increased productivity, but also to a large extent well-being and employee engagement, says Mikkel:
"The latter in particular has become a major driver, and there is feedback just the means to increase both parameters at the same time without it being particularly costly. So I think feedback is trending right now because it speaks to things that are up and coming in the more corporate part of the business."
- Mikkel Nordqvist, Feedwork
Jonas also points out that being able to give constructive feedback also makes it possible to enter into good, collaborative relationships and constellations more quickly:
"If something doesn't work out in terms of cooperation, it's important to be able to express it in a good, constructive and respectful way. That way you become more authentic in your relationships."
How to create a healthy feedback culture in your organisation
Feedwork's concept of feedback is based on openness and an authentic approach to the individual, says Jonas:
"For a feedback culture to be healthy, it must be based on trust and curiosity about other people and be founded in an environment of acceptance. Furthermore, the organisation should actively work on goal setting at the organisational, team and individual level in order to keep feedback as relevant as possible".
It is popularly known that you need to spend no less than 10,000 hours on something before you fully master it. As athletes, it's a claim the men of Feedwork certainly support. They themselves have become experts in feedback by practising different techniques and real-life scenarios, which is why their workshop structure is also characterised by a high level of participant involvement, explains Mikkel:
"We are pragmatic - we train and create some expectations for the day. We believe it takes training to deliver a good result. We have to increase the base level, because you almost never rise to your expectations, but rather fall back on what you have actually trained. That's why we make a point of doing as little talking as possible ourselves at our workshops, and making sure that participants get to practice and work on feedback interactions for the majority of the time."
In order to give organisations the best possible results, Feedwork often takes a temperature measurement of the current feedback culture through a survey-based tool that they have developed for this purpose. From what the temperature measurement shows, a plan is made for what the organisation specifically needs to work on to move one step closer to a healthy feedback culture.
This approach ensures that they do not set too low or too high a level of development for each organisation. You can read more about Feedwork and their approach here.
The healthy feedback culture requires that it is kept alive. That's why development doesn't stop when Feedwork is done teaching and guiding you. No, it is very much about you as managers and employees taking the lead and starting to implement feedback as a tool. To succeed with your new feedback culture, it is essential that you set up a framework for how best to work with it in your organisation, concludes Mikkel:
"We usually say that one of the lowest hanging fruits you can pick - let's say in a team of five - is simply to clarify the different personal preferences we have in terms of how we prefer to give and receive feedback. Start with yourself and say for example "when you are going to give me feedback on something collaborative, please focus on being very specific and detailed about how you experienced the situation" and that way you go all the way around the table".
Read more at: https://www.finduddannelse.dk/artikler/tips-og-vejledninger/Derfor_skal_I_have_en_sund_feedbackkultur__d14350.html
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